Athletic shoes nowadays are so bright they slap you in the face like a flounder. We grew up with Converse, the one-stop shoe for all things athletic. Really, they were nothing more than some heavy canvas glued on a slab of rubber, but they worked for everything. I loved my Converse shoes and would get a new pair at the start of every school year. I loved the box they came in even better though and carted the box off to school to use for storing my art supplies.
The art projects we did in elementary school were pretty standard fare, but for me, the insides of my art box was the art project, marked up with a rich patina of broken crayon pieces, half chewed globs of Bazooka gum, and a hate note from Becki Svorctisvetti, a mean little blonde who once punched me in the stomach. Fortunately, Becki left my school shortly after her arrival when her dad changed careers and became an organ deliverer in another city. That bit about her dad could have been a rumor, and as kids we never knew if those “organs” he was delivering were for medical experiments, transplants, or perhaps something more sinister. Becki was odd in so many ways, and so, in the dark recesses of our minds, we thought that one of his deliveries, like a nebulous internal organ, might show up in our science class for dissection.
I also had creepy thoughts that Becki was out for me, and that a leftover liver or body part might show up unexpectedly in my crayon box, so I would open my art box very slowly when art class began. Art boxes still have that effect on me to this day, and as much as I like to use them occasionally in my art, I get a little pit in my spleen (right where Becki hit me) every time I think about using part of a shoe box in my art. However, our art teacher, Miss Flareside, loved those shoe boxes, and she took great pains to organize them for us on a long wall she shared with the science room, covered with a huge Periodic Table. Since the science teacher, Mr. Tamperville, was so territorial, he resented having those art boxes in his space at all and insisted that they be arranged according to the order of the elements on his billboard-size chart.
My box was initially assigned to the element Berkelium, the one most closely aligned alphabetically with my last name. However, when Becki left school to assist her father delivering hearts that were still pumping, a new boy arrived whose last name was Berkelium. Of all things! The very elemental space that was assigned to house my art box belonged to a real person, Donny Berkelium, and he got my art space! Apparently, when they eradicated plutonium in 1949 by bombarding it with Americium, Donny Berkelium’s grandfather pulled the switch in the nuclear fission laboratory, and in celebration changed his name from Bercowitz to Berkelium. As a result of Donny usurping my space on the periodic table, I was subsequently assigned the empty and lifeless space for Argon, a gaseous element that has no outstanding characteristics at all.
I was devastated. Nobody in the whole school wanted Argon, especially me. To add insult to injury, Argon was a gas, and thus occupied a space nine feet up on the towering Periodic Table wall. Argon was so high up, in fact, that for someone like myself that was barely cracking the four feet mark, my art box was downright dangerous to retrieve. And embarrassing.
I only tried to get that box down one time, and it literally scarred me for life. I snuck to the back of the room long after everyone else was working on their popsicle stick pumpkins and when my diminutive stature would not be so evident. Carefully, I arranged the remaining boxes as a set of steps that I could use to reach up and snag my Argon art box. Just as I had my box in hand however, one of the boxes underneath started wobbling and I had to reach up to steady myself on the horizontal support pole, right above Krypton, and in grabbing it, brought the entire periodic table down on top of me.
I can tell you those elements do not mix very well, and when they fell on top of one another, they created another nuclear reaction, later named the Manhattan Project, between our art teacher Miss Flareside and Mr. Tamperville.
Now you may understand why I invented the good Dr. Stick O’Head, one of the characters that pops up now and again in my art. He is the mad scientist, the crazy inventor with only one eye, working in his darkly lit laboratory during the lightning storm in every scary movie you ever watched as a kid. The little guy inside my art box (that dark secretive Argon box that came tumbling down from the Periodic Table) is still busy creating things. He is still there with the crayon bits and chunks of dried glue, spelunking around, making Frankensteins out of leftovers, pouring one test tube into the other, and keeping an eye out for Becki’s return.